The prevalence of urinary incontinence following radicalprostatectomy and its related factors: A national registrybased study

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the prevalence and the risk factors of urinary inconti-nence following radical prostatectomy in Iranian population. This study is conducted based on the availabledata from the National Cancer Registry.

In this retrospective study, we extracted the information ofall the patients with organ-confined prostate cancer who underwent radical prostatectomy from 2010 to 2014.All the patients were interviewed face to face or via telephone to collect additional data. Urinary incontinencewas evaluated by a questionnaire using the definition based on pads use. The effects of risk factors were eval-uated using logistic regression models.

The details of 13,583 registered patients with prostate cancerwere collected. Overall, the prevalence of urinary incontinence was estimated as 10.5% (n=1424). It is impor-tant to mention that the highest proportion of cases with urinary incontinence belonged to the age group of71-80 years old (n=502, 35.2%), as well as patients with elementary education (n=458, 32%) or no education atall (n=333,23.5%). Furthermore, more cases lived in urban settings (n=1159,81.7%), one-fourth of them (n=365)smoked tobacco, and nearly 11% of them reported having been diagnosed with diabetes (n=152). The oddsof having urinary incontinence increased by 20% in patients who had undergone radiotherapy as part of theirtreatment for prostate cancer (AOR=1.20, 95%CI: 1.07,1.36).

We estimated the prevalence of urinaryincontinence after radical prostatectomy as 10.5% among prostate cancer patients. We found that having beenexposed to education, having been diagnosed with diabetes, and receiving radiotherapy, are amongst the signif-icant risk factors for urinary incontinence. We also suggested that more predictor variables should be recordedin the National Cancer Registry.